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Category: Tasting by Gin

This is a gin that hasn’t really been on my radar until now. To be honest I have a slight mistrust for flashy packaging – I may be a bit of a purist in that I think a gin should stand on its own. Despite my inherent distrust though, I have tasted some great gins with obvious effort having gone into branding and packaging, and have been suitably impressed with the quality of the gin. This brings us to Empiric Gin.

It’s hard to argue with the fact that bees are awesome. They pollinate plants to help make new plants, and they make both beeswax and honey. Honey, as it turns out, makes really good gin. Of course, regardless of the type of base spirit used, the distiller orchestrates the flavor profile. Wayward Distillation House, based in the Comox valley on Vancouver Island, does a great job of this with their spectacularly unique Unruly gin. Unruly gin uses honey spirit as a base and adds classic botanicals along with one or two twists to produce a smooth, pleasantly sweet and distinctive gin.

When I returned from the UK in Dec 2012 I was ecstatic to find out that a premium, small-batch gin was being produced locally in Victoria, BC. In 2008 the Victoria Spirits distillers set out to interpret gin in a more modern way, combining their love of Bombay Sapphire and Tanqueray gin with their collective backgrounds in science, bartending and in the culinary world to produce a beautiful, distinct, new “modern” gin. Arguably they were the first in Canada to bring a gin with such an innovative flavor profile to the market, paving the way for the local gin market to expand creatively.

The team at Odd Society Spirits takes pride in ingenuity and originality, and their gin is certainly created with this in mind. If there ever was a gin that could tackle unsuspecting imbibers, it is Wallflower Gin. Like the unexpected burst of happy, joyful indulgence of running through a sprinkler, Wallflower delivers a stunning, well-balanced flavour experience that is uniquely subtle and delightful.

I can’t help but be partial to Sipsmith London Dry Gin – it was the gin that started my love for gin in the first place. Paralleling my developing gin crush, on a bigger scale, Sipsmith was one of the major contributors to the start of the UK artisan, small batch gin craze when they opened 2009, being the first copper pot distillery to start up in London since 1820. Bashing through legislation difficulties and liquor laws, they started up with a successful business model that revolves around the quality of their spirit and sharing their love and pride in their own hand made spirits, which has subsequently led into a flood of small batch, hand-crafted gins entering the market.

The cure for a difficult week is surely a vacation at the lake – a weekend away with pure sunshine, and rotation between crisp, refreshing cool lake dips and sunny, warm wind. What would you give for that feeling at the end of a horrendous day, or in the middle of a cold downpour or the short days of winter? Enter Okanagan Spirits Gin.

When I lived abroad, one of the things I missed most was being outside in forests and by oceans on a regular basis. We take these things for granted here in BC, but fortunately, Phillips Brewery’s Fermentorium has seemingly found a way to bottle this awesomeness in their Stump Gin.

Noteworthy Gin isn’t your normal gin. A craft gin made by the Dubh Glas Distillery in Oliver BC and released earlier this year, it earned the distinction of being the audience’s 1st place choice award for favorite gin at the 2015 BC Distilled event.

I feel incredibly lucky to have access to this gin. A locally produced gin (Cowichan Valley, Vancouver Island), from scratch, using local suppliers for the wheat and classic botanicals, Ampersand is an organic gin that is absolutely gorgeous both on its own and in mixed drinks. It is possibly the most classic yet versatile gin I have tasted.

Edinburgh gin, like many of the newer gins, takes advantage of local botanicals along with traditional botanicals to create a unique regional gin that is not completely true to the London dry style. However, it is easy to tell that the distillery paid homage to the style without completely dismissing it.